Men Who Like 'Girls': Dress Rehearsal Rag

Hannah drives Adam right to the brink while Marnie makes a nice comeback

In a week when “Girls” creator and
star Lena Dunham made headlines for telling “Glamour” that she may quit acting,
and defended once again her choice to get naked in almost every episode, it’s
fitting that the season’s penultimate episode was so concerned with performing
— with and without your clothes on.

When
last we saw our heroine Hannah (Dunham), her boyfriend Adam (Adam Driver)
announced he was moving out in the weeks before his Broadway debut in “Major
Barbara,” George Bernard Shaw’s play about a woman in the Salvation Army. And
yet, there they were, going at it in the opening scene. This was not a
traditional breakup but what exactly the separation means to their
relationship provides much of the tension beneath their antics.

“I
feel like you’re leaving me in such slow motion that I can’t tell,” Hannah
tells Adam (after following him back to Ray’s house where he’s gone to practice
his Cockney accent).

“I
see you and I think it’s play time and it’s work time,” he counters, before
accompanying her in a cab back home.

The
old work-play dichotomy gets a workout in the other characters’ lives as
well: Marnie (Alison Williams) is
working as an assistant in an art gallery for a famous and frank aging
photographer ("Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" star Louise Lasser) though she really wants to be a
singer. Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) is diligently finishing college while her
recovering junkie roommate Jessa (Jemima Kirke) seems to be trying to cure her
addiction via frenetic dancing followed by collapse. “You’ve probably destroyed
your pleasure sensors but they’re probably going to grow back,” Shosh tells
her, in what passes for a compassionate line.

That
Jessa is going through coke withdrawal cold turkey makes me worry for her
character’s chances, and I just learned that using speed was once so common in
major league baseball that taking the field without having done so was
sometimes called “playing naked.” (Dunham, take note.)

It is Hannah’s show,
after all, and her anxiety about Adam’s looming stage career is only heightened
by another attempt to interview Patti LuPone about bone density medication for
the GQ advertorial project she is freelancing for. This meeting takes place at
the Broadway star’s apartment, where her house husband, a failed writer, serves them all dinner.

“We
go out and I’m still ‘Mr. Lupone,'” he tells Hannah and her friend Elijah
(Andrew Rannells), who his wife drools over — calling him “Troy Donahue” —
despite his blatant gayness. It is clear that Hannah sees her future as that of
an also-ran, a second banana and therein lies the root of her many bad choices
— quitting the lucrative if intellectually unrewarding day job at GQ, for
instance.

“Did
you think you were going to grow up and work in a sweat shop factory for puns?”
she harangues her fellow scribes, in what is probably as good a description of
most publishing jobs as you’ll find. (One of her colleagues, a lapsed poet,
sniffs that “Rhyming ‘need for tweed’ was a brilliant idea and you all signed
off on it.”)

The
title of the episode, “The Worst Best Song Ever” (written by Dunham and Paul
Simms), refers to the folk ditty Marnie and Adam’s fellow actor Desi perform
together at an open-mike performance. The scene manages to portray the awful
amateur hour feel of most such events with the sense that what they’re doing is
actually … pretty good. For the first time, Marnie sings with something like
conviction and their performance of the bad song (written by Dunham’s
boyfriend, and fun. member Jack Antonoff) actually has a kind of integrity.

“Adam’s
going to be on Broadway and Marnie’s going to be a pop star,” Shosh rhapsodizes
during the show, and then turns to Hannah: “And you were supposed to be a famous
writer and now you’re working in advertising.”